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A comment on Show HN: I built an open-source email builder, alternative to Beefree/Unlayer. Parent comment

Re:Show HN: I built an open-source email builder, alternativ... by oahmadov on Wednesday May 06, 2026 @01:59PM (#48039360)
No — built from scratch on Vue 3 + TipTap. Different data model entirely: Templatical stores templates as a typed JSON tree of blocks and renders them as MJML; GrapesJS is a generic HTML/CSS page-builder retrofitted for email via an MJML plugin.
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Re:Show HN: I built an open-source email builder, alternativ... by aeagentic on Wednesday May 06, 2026 @02:18PM (#48039658)
Thanks for the response, I will have a closer look! Maybe it's just the current UI Trends that look similar to me. Do you like grapes in general?
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Re:Show HN: I built an open-source email builder, alternativ... by oahmadov on Wednesday May 06, 2026 @02:30PM (#48039816)
Yeah, I get what you mean about UI. But honestly that similarity is also a selling point — people are used to how visual editors look and work. Shipping a drastically different UI is a hard sell.

GrapesJS — the OG embeddable visual builder. Yes, I like it. I haven't used it recently, but I built production landing-page builders on top of it a while back.

I saw they also have an email builder now and checked it just now. Looks and works fine, but you can tell it's a retrofitted approach from a landing-page builder. With Templatical I wanted to build something from the ground up, email-only.

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